The weight on her body altered, changed, and she swallowed another painful laugh. Oh, yes, because stone was impervious to fire. This rock sucked up her heat and demanded more. She gave gladly — she was so obviously going to die, anyway; what worry burns from molten rock?
And then the darkness was alive, and it fucking chittered. She shrieked, revolted, every cell in her body trying to squirm away. “True darkness,” she spat, catching the end of his statement. “Light.” She couldn’t get the thought to come out coherently, but it should have been obvious — darkness and light were opposed, and if he had the darkness, she had the light, and he kept feeding hers.
Abandoning the rock, she drew back all the fire she’d been spraying, and all the emotions she’d been converting. Drew, and drew, and held, and held, hers and his and anyone else’s she could reach.
And let it all go, concentrating solely on the shift from emotion to fire and nothing else, immolating herself in the centre of an enormous bonfire that grew and grew and burned white hot.
A pitying sigh escaped him then… as the silly little thing’s ego attempted to puff itself up. Had her sanity and sense abandoned her at the thought of death?
Did she forget that he was Loki, the bringer of Ragnarok? What was the strength of her light when it was a mere result of fire? T’was only a thoughtless inferno of energy that could only shine and consume.
In the back of his mind, he made a note to thank Baldr for the gift that allowed him to tolerate any form of light, no matter its intensity.
“So you wish to burn? Then allow me assist you.” He kindly stepped forth into the heart of the girl’s foolishly churning flames. With a swift yank he gripped the base of her obnoxiously long ponytail and the golden glow of his magic began to intensify until its power bleached into the purest of light. The temperature rocketed from molten heat into a supernova’s mute fury.
And from the middle of it all Liesmith purred into her mind.
“Last chance to apologize, before I make your precious Tony Stark a single man~”
He had never met that version of the inventor before but he supposed it would be cruel to kill off his woman without one last chance to back out. A Stark was a Stark, no matter how questionable his taste was.
She could barely speak, heat bleeding through her body and leaching moisture. Her mouth was cracked, lungs seared with each struggling breath, but fire was fire, heat heat, and so pain was irrelevant at the centre of the element that was her heart.
Until Loki spoke again.
/That/ was pain. Tony.
But very little was more central to her sense of self than honesty, and so she spit back, in a croak, nearly voiceless, “I don’t apologise for truth,” and abandoned the broken, burnt body in his hands.
Dead.
All that was left was a fading, whispering yearning shaped of love, which soon vanished in the heat.